


scenes from becoming a gun

by queenbaskerville



Series: something silent in us strengthens [2]
Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Canon Disabled Character, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Crossover, Deaf Character, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, The Hale Family, content warning for kate argent’s weird creepy predatory behavior
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27487510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Isaac, Camden, Kate, Derek—Eileen remembers them all.
Relationships: Eileen Leahy & Isaac Lahey, Eileen Leahy & Lillian O'Grady, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Kate Argent/Eileen Leahy
Series: something silent in us strengthens [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007082
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. eileen leahy

**Author's Note:**

> you don't technically _have_ to read the previous fic in this series, although it might help—the basic premise is that in this crossover eileen leahy and isaac lahey are cousins because their dads are half-brothers, and when eileen wasn't hunting she was going to a school for the deaf in northern california (the one that shoshanna stern went to growing up!)
> 
> title inspired by richard siken’s “wishbone,” “I will turn myself into a gun, because it's all I have"

**1996**

Lillian answered a call on her flip phone and gestured for Eileen to continue her knife throwing. The blades left her hand and arced through the cool spring air, landing—almost entirely—on the target. Eileen wondered if she’d be good as a pitcher. The idea might make Lillian grin and shake her head—she was too Irish for a sport as slow and American as baseball.

After one blade landed in the grass, a hand touched Eileen’s shoulder, and she turned to see Lillian looking somber. Lillian put her phone in her pocket to have both hands free to sign.

“Your cousin was born three days ago,” Lillian said. She finger-spelled: I-S-A-A-C.

A new little brother for Camden. She took a second to be jealous of his picturesque family—a father, a mother, himself and a baby brother.

“Your Aunt Sarah died,” Lillian said next, and Eileen was glad she wasn’t holding a knife, because she would’ve dropped it.

Aunt Sarah said, the last time Eileen saw her, “Too bad I’m not getting a girl like you." Her lips were legible in the mirror while she French-braided Eileen’s hair.

“Camden wants a brother, right?” Eileen asked.

“Sean and your grandpa want a boy, too,” Aunt Sarah said. She looked tired. “Lucky for them.”

If Eileen had known that was the last time, she would’ve leaned out her car window and waved at Aunt Sarah in the doorway of the house getting smaller behind them.

Eileen knew it didn’t make sense, but she thought her jealousy had caused it. Every time she’d seen Camden with his parents and wanted her own parents back, maybe she'd ruined it for him, maybe she’d spread whatever bad luck had marked her at birth.

They’d pick up a condolences card at the gas station and mail it. They weren’t going to the funeral, Lillian explained, because they wouldn’t make it back to California in time. Kansas was too far away.

Eileen went back to her knives.

Lillian kept the curtains drawn and the lights off in their motel room, but the dark barely affected the July heat, with all the hot strength of Arizona, and it did nothing for Eileen's fever. Eileen spent her tenth birthday feeling like she was burning to death.

A few days ago—not that Eileen could tell; time was as hazy as everything but the pain—they'd gone after a ghost that was disappearing drivers on Route 64. Lillian held it off rock salt blasts from her shotgun while Eileen dug up one of the ghost's shoes that had been left behind among some rocks on the side of the road, but when she'd been about to burn it, the ghost threw the car at her. If Eileen hadn't been glancing at Lillian constantly, worried for her safety, Eileen wouldn't have ever seen the car; she would never have known what killed her. She hadn't had time or instinct for a graceful roll—she lunged to the side, landed face-first in the rocky ground, and covered her head with her hands. She lay there gasping in the dirt until she felt a hand close around her arm and start dragging her; she turned over to see that it was Lillian, her hair and eyes wild, and she was saying something but Eileen was too shocked to read her lips. 

Eileen sat on the side of the road, peripherally aware that Lillian was pouring antiseptic on her arm. She’d somehow missed Lillian getting a first aid kit out even though it felt like she hadn’t taken her eyes off the overturned car once. There was a dim fire flickering to her left, the ghost’s leather shoe smoldering as ashes, but when she remembered this later she’d imagine the car burning—she was transfixed by the black car in descending twilight. She’d ridden across the country in it, seen it parked by every California apartment and every cheap motel—she’d practically grown up in that ’62 Oldsmobile—and it almost killed her. It never seemed so big before, not until it had come toward her, airborne, almost the last thing she never saw. Lillian gently turned Eileen’s palms up and poured antiseptic over them. The scrapes burned in a way that whatever happened to her arm hadn’t and she clenched her wet fists. Eileen kept staring at the car until Lillian tilted her head back.

Eileen obediently closed her eyes. Lillian’s fingernails combed through her hair once before the antiseptic drizzled over cuts in Eileen’s forehead. This too stung but it was secondary to the afterimage of the car coming toward her behind Eileen’s closed eyelids.

Somewhere between the side of the highway and their motel somebody picked them up, Lillian arranged for a tow truck and salvaged as much of their guns and supplies as possible, and the hand-stitched cut on Eileen’s arm became infected.

It was always dark, always too hot. Sometimes she sat up in bed, propped up with a pillow and lost herself in the hallucinogenic colors of Looney Tunes. Sometimes she lay down in bed and spun under the ceiling fan. She pulled at her clothes and kicked off the blankets when she had the strength, wept when she didn’t. Lillian was usually there with a wet cloth on her forehead. She only had a few fevered days, Lillian would later tell her, but until the fever broke it felt like she was burning to death. Sometimes the spinning fan felt like it was lifting her off the bed, making her hover toward the ceiling, and that was when she thought maybe she really had died on the side of the highway. Eileen was a ghost simmering in the dim nothing, and she wished Lillian would finish burning her body already so the heat would stop, everything would stop. Or was this how it would feel forever? Her body would burn to ash, and her ghost would stop haunting the motel room, but she’d always feel that last fire burning?

A few days later she was lucid and eating Cheerios, and she helped Lillian bring the duffel bags full of their weapons and supplies to the red truck she’d gotten somewhere. Her arm ached a little, but she hefted everything without complaint. She was terrified Lillian would suggest that she was too weak to go on, that she would have to take a break, be dropped off with a relative, but she must’ve proven her worth, because they hit the road and headed for Nevada. One last hunt before the school year started again.

  
  


Lillian hadn’t found a hunt for the two days Eileen had off for fall break, but Eileen had already told her friends she would busy and couldn’t do sleepovers, so Lillian drove Eileen out to Beacon Hills.

Normally they went to Grandpa Colin’s house to unload their bags before they went to Uncle Sean’s, but this time Lillian drove straight there. It was odd to walk up to the front door and know that Aunt Sarah wouldn’t be there to answer the door when Eileen knocked.

Camden opened it before they reached the step. He had shadows under his eyes. Eileen gave him a little wave. She felt so sad for him—she’d lost both her parents before she could get to know them, but the grief had to be at least a little bit similar to losing one parent you knew.

Uncle Sean wasn’t home. Eileen understood Camden saying he was at work before she got distracted by a weird smell. It turned out to be baby Isaac’s diaper, which Lillian changed with practiced hands (and disgust), and she showed Eileen how to do it. She tried to show Camden, too, but he said something about already knowing how to do it; it was just so gross he didn’t want to. Eileen didn’t blame him. It was nasty.

Lillian had Eileen help her give Isaac a bath in the sink. She helped sponge him down and gentle scrubbed his short tufts of curly hair with baby shampoo. Once he was clean, he smelled kind of nice, and it was fun making weird faces to try to get him to smile. When he finally did, that’s when Eileen turned to Lillian and signed the letter I shaken next to her right cheek—he had a dimple there. Lillian understood, and echoed it; an I shaken next to her right cheek meant Isaac.

Lillian helped Eileen hold him, showing her how to hold his head and neck, and that’s when Eileen knew—this heavy living thing, with a tiny hand clutching one of her fingers—she wanted to protect him. This was what hunting was for, to make sure banshees or anything else never hurt this kid, to make sure Isaac never felt Eileen’s pain or loss or grief or loneliness. She wanted him to wear that stupidly happy expression, showing off that dimple on his cheek, forever and ever.

Camden wanted to swim in the backyard pool, so Lillian put Isaac in a rocking baby chair and sat in a pool chair next to him while Eileen and Camden jumped in. Camden underwater was Camden at his best—he and Eileen would crawl across the bottom of the pool, dive down to fetch things, stare through the blurry water at each other, and for once he wasn’t ignoring her, for once he was just as deaf as she was. Bubbles streamed from their noses and mouths and the world was blue.

Around dinner time, Lillian searched the house for baby formula and came up empty.

“I have to call Uncle Sean,” she said and stepped out of the kitchen. Camden sat at a kitchen chair and kicked his legs.

“I’m sorry about Aunt Sarah,” Eileen said.

Camden didn’t say anything, just kept kicking his legs. Eileen wondered if maybe she’d said it too quietly, so she tried again.

“I’m sorry about Aunt—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Camden said, face screwed up, and he stood up from his chair so fast that it clattered to the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Eileen saw Isaac’s face screw up, too, and he started to cry in his high chair.

Lillian came back, said something to Camden, and he stormed off. Lillian picked up Camden’s chair and said to Eileen, “We’re staying here tonight instead of Grandpa’s. I have to go the store.”

“I’ll make dinner?” Eileen asked.

Lillian nodded.

“If anything bad happens with Isaac,” she said, “call me on the house phone. If for some reason I don’t pick up, call 911 and let them know you’re deaf at the beginning of whatever you have to tell them. They’ll come.”

Eileen made Kraft mac and cheese and ate it alone. Isaac mouthed at a weird toy in his high chair.

Lillian came back with baby formula later. Uncle Sean didn’t come back until late, almost midnight, and Eileen only knew because the bright headlights in the driveway woke her up. He was gone again in the morning.

“You’re lucky you’re deaf,” Camden said to her over breakfast. “I bet you sleep great.”

Eileen must’ve looked confused, because he explained.

“The baby won’t stop screaming,” he said. “He’s...”

“What?” Eileen said, not recognizing the word.

“Aunt Lillian!” he yelled, mouth wide.

She stepped into the door. “What?”

He said something to her.

“Oh,” she said. For Eileen, she finger-spelled C-O-L-I-C and C-O-L-I-C-K-Y. “Means he cries a lot.”

“Why?” Eileen asked.

Lillian shrugged and left.

Camden never called him _Isaac_ , or even _my brother_ —always _the baby_. He didn’t like to hold him, either, though maybe as an eight year old he wouldn’t be strong enough to do it. Eileen didn’t know. Eileen ended up taking care of Isaac all day while Lillian napped and Camden swam out back because Eileen couldn’t hear Isaac’s colicky wailing and she was mad at Camden, anyway—he’d said comics were for boys and not girls this morning when she asked him to share. Fine, she didn’t want to read his stupid comics anyway.

Even though she couldn’t hear Isaac screaming, it still distressed her a little; she hated seeing that screwed-up expression on his face, red and open-mouthed, that meant he was upset. Inexplicable crying, but she couldn’t help but search for an explanation anyway. Was he hungry? Hurting? Was it grief for his mother? He couldn’t understand them, but maybe he knew somehow, maybe he felt it in the hospital when they left each other. Maybe he was lonely. Eileen rocked him and made sounds from the bottom of her throat that she hoped passed for music and held him up in front of every window in the house, and sometimes it worked. She wondered if this was something Lillian had to do for her when she was raising her. The diapers and the formula for sure, but did Lillian hold baby Eileen up to motel windows and let her watch the cars pass by? Did she sing her then whatever songs she searched for now on the radio?

Sometimes, in rare moments, Lillian would hug Eileen, and it made her throat close up, the intensity of her head on someone’s chest, feeling their pulse, feeling the _thud-thud_ of their heartbeat. She wished she could live in that feeling. Eileen held Isaac to her chest that way, one of his tiny ears over her heart, and she hoped the rhythm would soothe him, hoped her heart was strong enough to help his.


	2. lillian o’grady

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this pov might sound like it's hating on the hale family but it's from a hunter's point of view, so that's why. content warning for ableism, mentions of excessive alcohol use, and a somewhat inactive reaction to child abuse in this chapter. 
> 
> also this doesn't matter but i imagine lillian as maria doyle kennedy

**1988**

Lillian drove past the _Welcome to Beacon Hills_ sign—driving on this side of the road was so strange—and wondered once again what could’ve possibly made Colin Leahy run this far. Tracking him down from Ireland—which he’d left twenty-six years earlier—had been no small feat, but she wasn’t a hunter for nothing. It had actually been a loose network of hunters that had been the key, in the end—one Irish hunter she knew had put her in touch with an American hunter in South Dakota who’d spread the word about who she was looking for, and it had been a long shot, since America was so vast and the man not a hunter himself, but the Argent family in Beacon Hills called her, and here she was.

A blond teenage boy opened the door.

“Chris, isn’t it?” Lillian said. “I’m Lillian O’Grady; your father and I spoke on the phone—”

“Of course, come in,” he said, and he took her bag as he held the door open for her.

A man came around the corner into the hallway, with confident strides and a deeply receding hairline, and clapped his hands together. Lillian got the feeling that there was a deep intensity hiding beneath his friendly air, but all hunters had their quirks; as long as he reserved his severity for the creatures he killed, she didn’t much mind.

“Miss O’Grady,” he said, “I’m Gerard; it’s wonderful to finally meet you.”

“Lillian, please,” she said. “Thank you for having me.”

“Of course,” he said. “You’re right on time; I’ve just finished the lamb chops.”

Chris Argent got the booster seat for Eileen out of the trunk of Lillian’s creaky Oldsmobile while Lillian loitered in the kitchen and rocked Eileen.

“Oh,” Gerard said in a hushed voice, “is she asleep?”

“Maybe getting there,” Lillian said, “but you can talk normally; she’s deaf.”

“Oh,” Gerard said again, this time in that shocked and pitying tone that Lillian was still getting used to. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Hear what?”

Lillian turned to see a five year old girl holding a toy sword and shield.

“This is my daughter Kate,” Gerard said. “Kate, this is Miss Lillian O’Grady; she’s visiting us for a few days.”

“Nice to meet you,” Kate said. She thwacked her fake sword on the doorframe.

Her was as blonde as her brother’s, but much longer and pulled back into loose pigtails. Instead of her father’s brown eyes or her brother’s blue, she had a hazel-green, and Lillian wondered if that—in addition to the large age difference between her and Chris—was a hint that they had different mothers. She decided, counting the seats at the table as Chris set up the high chair for her, not to ask.

Jillian had a habit of trying to verbally coax Eileen to eat even though she couldn’t hear her, and she hadn’t been embarrassed of it before, but she lowered her voice in font of her audience.

“Come on, love,” Lillian said. Eileen accepted a spoonful of mashed potatoes, and Lillian murmured, “Tusa mo chailín bán.”

“I like your accent,” Kate said. “What language is that?”

“Gaelic,” Lillian said. “I’m from Ireland.”

The girl had nonstop questions all evening, but Lillian didn’t mind; it was better than a tantrum or anything else.

“Is Eileen going to have a cool accent when she grows up?” Kate said.

“She may not speak at all,” Lillian said. “I’m not sure how it works with deaf kids. Maybe her family will teach her how, and she’ll talk like they do.”

“She’s not yours?” Kate asked.

“Kate,” Gerard and Chris warned at the same time, but Lillian waved them off.

“Her parents passed away,” Lillian said. “I’m taking her on a wee trip to see if her grandpa and maybe her uncle live in town.”

“How’d her parents die?” Kate asked.

Lillian glanced to Gerard, uncertain what the girl knew of hunting. Even the son, she realized, might know nothing; she wasn’t sure what she should say.

“It was a banshee,” Gerard said. “Killed the parents and deafened the poor child, isn’t that right?” At Lillian’s nod, he added, “Terrible thing, such a shame,” with a shake of his head.

“Did you kill it?” Kate asked.

“Unfortunately not,” Lillian said. “But I’m trying to track it. Once wee Eileen’s with her family, I’ll be back on the hunt.”

“Chris hunts,” Kate announced proudly. “He passed his hunter training and now he’s going to Japan.”

Chris’s cheeks flushed but he straightened ever so slightly with pride.

“Just for a weapons deal,” he said.

“He just turned eighteen, and he passed the test quicker than most I’ve ever seen,” Gerard said approvingly. “Once he’s finished his bullets—he has to forge six silver ones with the Argent fleur-de-lis, family tradition—he’ll be off.”

The hunter from South Dakota had mentioned this on the phone, the fact that these were an old family of hunters, _old_ old, not normal hunters—normal being the haphazard lone wolf who got pulled into the life when someone died. It was still odd to sit in this ordinary kitchen and think about that, several hundred years of ritual and tradition, codes and legacies. 

“Congratulations,” Lillian said, and she lifted her glass of Merlot and inclined her head.

“Did you do good on your hunter test?” Kate asked.

“I didn’t have a formal test,” she said. “I just sort of learned on the job, as it were.”

“I’m going to do great on mine,” Kate said with a flip of her pigtails. “I’m going to do even better than Chris.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Chris said. “Come on, eat your carrots.”

After Kate was put to bed, Lillian settled with Eileen into an armchair and sat with Gerard and Chris, who informed her about the goings-on in Beacon Hills.

“If this Lahey is the one you’ve been looking for, Eileen will be perfectly safe in town,” Gerard said. “The local werewolves—have you heard?”

Lillian’s grip on Eileen tightened at the phrase—local werewolves, what the bloody hell—and shook her head.

“The Hale family,” Gerard said. “They’re old blood. When they first resettled in Beacon Hills and started building this town, we Argents followed, and we keep them in check. There’s a whole brood of them, most of them werewolves, but they know better than to cross any lines.”

“They’ve got a werewolf and a human who are my age,” Chris said. “We went to school together; they know to keep to themselves. Harmless,” he added. “A few younger ones, too, but they’re homeschooled until they’re old enough to control themselves.”

“They usually enter the school system toward the end of elementary school,” Gerard said. “How old’s their youngest now, Chris?”

He asked in that way where he already knew the answer; he was just demonstrating that Chris was on top of things, too.

“Talia’s got that youngest brother, Peter Hale, who’s twelve,” Chris said, “and her daughter Laura is Kate’s age. Both werewolves.”

“Talia’s pregnant with another; no telling yet whether it’s human or not,” Gerard said. He didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “They breed like rabbits.”

“But Eileen will be safe here,” Chris said. “The Hale family keeps out of trouble.”

“I’ll make sure Kate warns her away from the Hales once she's old enough to think about socializing,” Gerard said.

It should’ve been calming to hear that they’d look out for Eileen, but the future was suddenly too easy to envision, this future in which Eileen was separated from her; it made Lillian uneasy.

“These Laheys,” she said. “What’re they like?”

“Sean Lahey’s in his mid twenties,” Chris said, “and he's the assistant coach of the swim team at the high school. I haven’t really interacted with him, but he seems like a hard worker; I think he'll be promoted to head coach when the current one retires. The swim team does well enough.”

“He and his father, Colin Lahey, own most of a large cemetery in town,” Gerard said. “We have a plot there. Beyond that...” Gerard spreads his hands. “I have his phone number and his address.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said. “You’ve been a huge help, truly."

The man who answered the phone when she called after breakfast the next morning had a gruff voice and an Irish accent that made it very clear he was from West Cork.

"My name is Lillian O'Grady, and I'm calling for Colin Lahey," she said.

"This is he," Colin said. "This isn't a bloody international call, is it?"

"No, I'm in Beacon Hills," she said. "I'm calling about your son."

"Sean?" He sounded taken aback.

"Padraic," she said. "Your son in Cork."

"You don't sound like you're from Cork," he said suspiciously.

"I'm from Dublin," she said.

"North side of Dublin, yeah?" Colin said. "Thought so. Look, I wasn't in his life. Haven't seen nor spoken to the lad since he were three. You could hardly say he's mine. What's this about?"

"I'm calling because he passed away," Lillian said. There's a silence. "Two years ago," she said. "I'm very sorry for your loss."

Another silence. Lillian allows it to stretch out between them.

"You said you're in Beacon Hills," Colin said eventually. "You don't need to be in Beacon Hills to call me and tell me that Padraic is dead."

"I've brought your granddaughter," Lillian said.

Another silence. 

"You're Padraic's wife?" he said.

"His sister-in-law," Lillian said. The lie came easily, but it surprised her as she said it. Well, too late to take it back now.

About five minutes later, she hung up the phone and came inside from the backyard. At the kitchen table, Eileen was toddler-babbling in her booster seat, and Gerard kept an eye on her while reading what looked like a very worn copy of a murder-mystery novel. 

"How did it go?" he asked.

"I don't know," Lillian said. "I'm meeting him and his son for dinner at five."

Lillian lifted Eileen out of her booster seat and hefted her onto her hip. Eileen cooed a little more in her ear. 

"Does little Eileen like driving around?" Gerald said. 

_Sure hope so,_ Lillian thought, _since it's all we do._

"Chris could drive you around Beacon Hills," Gerald said. "Help you and Eileen get to know the place."

This was how Lillian ended up moving the booster seat from her beat up Oldsmobile into the slick black automobile of an eighteen year old who looked like he'd rather be doing anything else but was too polite to say anything about it. He waited patiently while she strapped Lillian into the booster seat and gave her a teething ring and another toy, and he held the passenger side door open for her before he went to the driver's side.

Beacon Hills was nestled in a valley and surrounded by forest, with a bit of high-rise city life in its center, but Chris mostly drove her through the suburban area his family lived in, and then some of the surrounding middle-of-the-road areas. Chris drove better than most highschoolers, which she assumed had to do with his hunting experience. They chatted a little bit about the town: Chris pointed out places he'd done something significant, hang out scenes with his friends, grocery stores and the vet. 

"Beacon Hills High School," he said with a gesture. 

Lillian quieted, and Chris with his eternal patience waited again, even slowed the car, as they drove past what might be Eileen's high school. Red brick, white structures, blue pillars. Eileen could get off those yellow buses and go to class, make friends, maybe even find a boyfriend. It should be exciting, but Lillian only felt anxiety. Werewolves in the area, and Eileen wouldn't even know... but the Argents would look after her. But what if Eileen didn't listen, or what if it wasn't enough? Maybe they'd train her, if Lillian asked—but what if they didn't or couldn't, and Eileen was left unprotected? 

_She'll be fine,_ Lillian told herself as they drove past the elementary school Kate Argent attended. Little Eileen with her dark hair and a backpack walking up to the front door. What would being deaf mean for her at these schools? Would they put in the effort to reach her, or would they let her slip through the cracks?

Lillian reminded herself that life on the road as a hunter would be no better. Worse, maybe. Lillian knew nothing about deaf culture or how to raise a deaf child, and Eileen would never have stability, Eileen would only have the hunt. She could avenge her parents, but what else would she have?

Chris dropped her off at the Argent household before heading out to continue the work on his silver bullets. Lillian took Eileen to a park and pushed her in one of the swing sets for toddlers. This kept them occupied for a while; Eileen loved being in motion more than anything else. Lillian kept looking around the park and wondering if any of the children climbing on the playground were werewolves from the Hale family. Being a human in the Hale family must be even stranger, she thought. Not only werewolves living peacefully as a family, but werewolf and human children as siblings, as cousins. Were the human Hales raised to defend themselves against supernatural creatures? to be their werewolf relatives’ human shields against hunters? She couldn’t imagine the dynamic. 

When Lillian arrived on Sean Lahey’s doorstep that evening, it was his pregnant wife who opened the door. The woman took one look at the two year old in Lillian’s arms and couldn’t even speak.

“I’m Lillian O’Grady,” Lillian began, but the woman was already yelling for Sean.

He shouted something back across the house, and then he was there in an instant, a twenty-something bespectacled man in a bit of a rage that someone had been yelling for him, and he immediately knew whatever was upsetting his wife, because he said, “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life!” to her and ignored Lillian entirely.

“Then what’s she at our door with a baby for?” the woman hissed back at him, one hand protectively resting on her pregnant abdomen, and then Lillian realized.

“I spoke with your father Colin on the phone earlier about dinner,” she interrupted them. “This is your niece, Eileen.”

“Niece,” Sean echoed.

“I thought you were an only child?” the woman says, baffled.

“I am,” Sean says.

_Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,_ Lillian didn’t say. “You had a half brother—is your father here yet? He can explain—”

“Is this some kind of a money thing?” Sean said. “What, you think because you and my dad are both Irish, you’re gonna fool him—convince him to give you money to raise whoever’s bastard kid that is?”

“Excuse me—” Lillian began, affronted, but then a car pulled up in the driveway, and they all paused long enough to watch Colin Lahey step out of it.

“You’re here already,” Colin said. “You must be Lillian. And is this Eileen?”

He approached the front step and put his hands in his pockets while he looked at Eileen.

“Dad,” Sean said. “What’s going on?”

They ended up seated at Sean and his wife Sarah’s kitchen table. Even as pregnant as she was, she still served them all, declining Lillian’s offers of help. Both of the men seemed content to allow her to do all the work.

Now that Lillian had the chance to take a look at them all, she took in their faces, looking for similarities between the Lahey men and Eileen’s little face. She tried to remember Eileen’s parents’ faces, too, what little life was left in them when she found their bodies. Eileen seemed to have the same dark eyebrows as Colin and Sean, a trait that had skipped over her father, if Lillian remembered correctly. Eileen’s nose shape came from her father’s side of the family, all three of the men echoed in that aspect of her face. Her dark eyes, however, were not reflected in anybody else here. Colin had blue eyes, and Sean’s were hazel; Lillian thought back and remembered that Eileen’s father had brown eyes while her mother had been a light-eyed redhead. Maybe Eileen’s paternal grandmother had passed that on down. Lillian tried to imagine Eileen as a grown woman, while looking at these grown men, but only a hazy patchwork of traits formed in her mind.

Colin explained to Sean and Sarah that he’d had a son before he’d immigrated to the US and married Sean’s mother. Lillian knew all this, but she payed attention to the way Colin told it—he brushed over most of the details, said only that he’d left, not why. No justification or defense, but not coming from a place of shame; no, he just projected an air of firmness that brokered no questioning.

“Padraic married, had a daughter, and now he’s gone,” Colin said. “This here is Padraic’s sister-in-law and his child.”

Sean brought up again the idea that Lillian was trying to scam them, but Colin wouldn’t hear it.

“You think I didn’t check to make sure that my own son is dead?” Colin said, pitching his napkin onto the table. Lillian thought for a moment that he might slam a fist down. “You think I didn’t bloody check?”

Sean stewed in silence at the rebuke, fiddling with the beer bottle in his hands. Colin had been heavily drinking from the moment he set foot in the house and didn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. Lillian glanced to Sarah, who was simultaneously entirely avoiding being part of conversation while still tuning in like her life depended on it.

Her closed off body language—maybe it did. Lillian took in the house, the men’s attitudes, and fed Eileen another spoonful of peas in wary silence. _Thank God she can’t hear this,_ Lillian thought. She’d do anything to undo the damage the banshee had done, but at least Eileen wasn’t upset by the angry voices and adding to all the fuss.

“She’s a pretty little girl,” Sarah said to Lillian after a lull in the conversation. “Ours is a boy,” she said, a hand on her belly once more, “but maybe we’ll have a girl, too, someday.”

Sean didn’t look too enthused about the idea, but he didn’t shoot it down, either; just moved on.

“How long are you staying in town?” he asked Lillian, more calmly than she expected. He either cooled down easily or knew how to keep his anger at a very low simmer. “Or are you thinking about moving here?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lillian said. The fact that she’d intended to leave Eileen here with either her grandfather or her uncle, Lillian kept that to herself for now. “It’s hard to decide what to do. I haven’t figured out what’ll best suit her needs.”

“Needs,” Sean repeated, eyebrows raised. “Talk like that, you make her seem like one of those special-ed kids.”

“She’s deaf,” Lillian said, and she was met with a heavy silence. “I mentioned it before,” she said, though now she really couldn’t remember whether or not she had. It just was—little Eileen was deaf. That was the way of things. She sometimes forgot other people expected different. 

“Bloody shame,” Colin said. “I always thought they ought to put kids like that out of their mercy—a dog has too many pups, one can’t keep up, stays too small, owners figure out the solution pretty quick. But he can’t have any more kids now, can he.” Colin gazed into his glass with a passive sort of regret.

Lillian was too shocked to have anything ready to say back to that. It was the exact second, though, that she decided she was keeping Eileen. She should’ve known when she arrived at the Argent’s house, really—that first hesitation at parting with the girl she’d been looking after for almost two years now—but it hadn’t been until this extreme of a moment that she knew she wouldn’t leave Eileen. Not in the hands of people like that—not in anybody’s hands. Lillian wanted to gather Eileen in her arms and leave Beacon Hills in the rearview mirror right then and there.

“I think there’s a school for the deaf in Fremont,” Sarah said. “Isn’t there, Sean?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Sean said. “Heard it’s an alright place.”

And that was the moment Lillian decided not to forget Beacon Hills entirely. Here was a vision of the future clear as daybreak—basing herself in Fremont, learning how to best look after Eileen while letting her attend that deaf school, training her and taking her on hunts on the west coast and midwest area when Eileen wasn’t in school. Colin Lahey she didn’t give a damn about, but this boy that Sean and Sarah were about to have, this cousin of Eileen’s, that could be Eileen’s part-time family, her motivation to keep hunting. Someone to remind her of the family she’d want to avenge, and someone she’d want to protect from supernatural creatures lurking out there in the dark. Lillian had never been the maternal type, but—Eileen was with Lillian in a shitty motel in Oklahoma when she’d taken her first steps, wobbled across that dull carpet and into Lillian’s hands still dark with gun oil. Lillian couldn’t bear the thought of losing this child she’d been looking after. And Beacon Hills proved she might not have to—one door had closed when she’d read bad energy from the Laheys, but a window opened with the new information of that school for the deaf.

Lillian fed Eileen another spoonful of food, lied another few times about her “sister,” her connection to the family, and knew she was going to figure this out.

Lillian practiced signs with the hearing-parents-of-deaf-children group. She joined the group late, having taken a little longer than expected to get settled in Fremont. On her first day there, instructor reiterated the family words, mom and dad and sister and brother and grandma and grandpa and aunt and uncle. Lillian requested cousin, and the instructor demonstrated the gender-neutral and gendered signs. They went through a few more things, but mostly practiced in pairs. Lillian was relieved to find that she wasn’t the only person there alone and partnered with a single mom.

After class Lillian approached, the instructor and asked her to go through the alphabet one more time.

“I’m just Eileen’s guardian,” Lillian said. “She’d be finger-spelling my name when talking about me, not doing any of those.”

“Well, we’ll definitely keep practicing the alphabet, but you’ll actually come up with a specific sign that represents you,” the instructor said. “It would be a lot to finger-spell ‘Lillian’ all the time!”

“I’ve got to invent a brand new sign?” Lillian said.

“I forgot that we did this lesson before you signed up,” the instructor said.

She explained that most names were indicated by an initial or two with a particular gesture, or by a modified sign for a characteristic or trait. The instructor showed Lillian a few possibilities—a shaken L sign in a neutral space at the front or side of the body; or an L on a specific part of the body, like forehead or chin or wherever; or a start-to-finish gesture, such as an L over the heart that became an O or G (for O’Grady) over one wrist.

“You have to come up with a special sign for Eileen as well,” the instructor said. “Think about it, practice a few, see what feels right. I want you to have them ready by next time. I’ll make sure we do introductions of parents—or guardians—and their kids at the beginning of the lesson.”

Probably nothing over a wrist, Lillian decided as she left. Better to use only one hand as much as possible, in case she had a weapon in the other hand.

* * *

**1991**

The angry yelling drew Lillian to the kitchen. She arrived too late to see Colin hit Eileen, but she heard it, and she saw her girl sprawled on the floor, and that was enough.

“Don’t bloody touch her,” she roared, and she stormed in quick enough to take Eileen by the hand and lift her to her feet.

“Take Camden to the living room and go play,” she told Eileen. Years and years of hunting had steadied her hands no matter how frightened or angry she was, which meant she was able to sign very clearly.

Eileen, too shocked to cry, just nodded. She was five years old, and she held three-year-old Camden’s hand in order to lead him out of the room.

Lillian wheeled on Colin furiously.

“Don’t ever hit her,” Lillian said. “Don’t you ever—”

“You have no right,” Colin bellowed, “to tell me what to do in my own bloody house—”

“That is a _child_ ,” Lillian shouted, and they yelled at each other for a few more minutes until it culminated in a final, “Swear you’ll never hit her again, or I’ll never bring her back! You will never fucking see her again!”

“See if I give a damn!” Colin shouted, and Lillian spun on her heel and slammed the kitchen door behind her.

“Car,” she signed at Eileen, and she lifted Camden onto her hip for good measure.

It was only as she buckled Camden into Eileen’s old booster seat and Camden said aloud, “Where are we going?” that Lillian realized that Camden had heard everything. She was used to Eileen’s speech comprehension disappearing the moment her back was turned or if she exited a room.

“Back to your mum and dad’s,” Lillian said. “Then Eileen and I are going back Fremont.”

“Am I in trouble?” Camden asked.

“No, love,” Lillian said. “Your grandpa and I are just having a bit of a disagreement on childcare.”

“Okay,” Camden said.

Eileen asked the same question when Lillian checked on her seatbelt, signed, “Am I in trouble?”

“Definitely not,” Lillian said, repeating the sign for no a few times for emphasis.

It was only then that Lillian noticed the bruise beginning to form on Eileen’s chest from where she’d been knocked down, a large red mark peeking out from the top of her shirt. Lillian tried not to let her anger show in case Eileen thought Lillian was lying about Eileen not being in trouble.

She left them in the car with the windows down to go back inside and pack all their things. Colin was somewhere else in the house resolutely ignoring her as she took their overnight bags out to the car and then drove away.

Sean was at work, but Sarah was there to carry Camden inside, and it was only her offer of a cup of tea that stopped Lillian from ending the weekend visit early and going back to Fremont. Lillian still didn’t care for American tea, but Sarah had a blend of green tea that Lillian didn’t mind, and Sarah convinced her to stay the night— _just rest on the couch a while, stay for dinner at least, no sense driving in the dark_ even though it wasn’t that far—and Sarah talked her rage down from a blaze to a low burn while they sat in the backyard. She sensed enough about Lillian’s opinion not to try justifying or excusing Colin, but her calm, resigned _what-can-you-do_ attitude still seemed to leech the extremity from the situation. Lillian was still pissed off, though. Eileen needed to be tough, needed to be able to take a hit, but that would start during training, not like this.

That evening, while Lillian got dinner ready for the kids, Sarah showed Colin into the kitchen. Lillian tightened her grip on the wooden spoon she was cooking with, ready to start yelling at him again—how dare he show up here—but he held up a Walmart bag and said gruffly, “It’s for Eileen.”

Colin presented a Barbie doll still in its packaging to Eileen, who unboxed it with curious hands. Lillian frowned—it wasn’t exactly the most practical toy for a child’s skill development—but she interpreted for Eileen as Colin crouched down, said, “I know I might have scared you earlier,” and then “Do you like it?”

“Yes, thank you,” Eileen said, which were simple enough signs that Colin recognized them without Lillian needing to interpret.

Colin nodded, stood up, nodded again but to Lillian, and then left without another word.

“How sweet,” Sarah cooed.

Eileen showed the toy off to Camden, and Lillian went back to the stove. She thought of the kids playing together, thought of Sarah so happy to brush Eileen’s hair before bed, even though Eileen was old enough now to be, for the most part, doing that herself.

Supervised visits, Lillian decided. She’d be more careful with how she spent her time; she’d watch Eileen more closely. It was good for Eileen to be around family. It was.

  
  


* * *

**1996**

Between Sarah Lahey’s death during childbirth and Lillian taking Eileen to meet her baby cousin Isaac for the first time, spring turned into summer turned into fall. A number of difficult hunts had tested Eileen’s resilience—she’d come out strong on the other side, but she’d almost given Lillian a heart attack in the process. Death seemed to hang over them that year like a leaning tree, threatening but never getting close enough to crush them under its weight.

They’d lost the Oldsmobile, though; it had been too damaged by a particularly violent ghost in Arizona to be repaired—not with the kind of money Lillian had on hand, anyway. Cheaper to get something else, so Lillian salvaged their hunting supplies from the wreckage and bought a red truck that was good enough to get them where they needed to go. In that case it had been two more hunts and then back to Fremont for the beginning of the school year, and now it was Eileen’s fall break weekend, and since Lillian hadn’t found them a hunt, they were headed to Beacon Hills.

They usually stayed the night at Colin’s house since he had an empty guest room, but after seeing the state of Sean’s house—and eight-year-old Camden alone with the baby—Lillian decided to stay the weekend there; she wasn’t their nanny but she also couldn’t leave them by themselves.

Sean was in an utter state. From the looks of his cabinets, he’d become a heavier drinker than even his father, and Lillian would be surprised if Camden had eaten a regular-sized meal that wasn’t served at school since the time after the funeral when people’s donated casseroles stopped coming. Lillian took care of things around the house, called him to ask him why he hadn’t restocked on baby formula and to tell him to come the fuck home, but he only gave her the brand name and hung up. He didn’t come home until incredibly late, and she tried everything—sympathizing with him, shouting at him, nothing seemed to sink in. He left early the next morning anyway—for the cemetery or the bar, she wasn’t sure. Colin apparently wasn’t doing much to help out, either. _Too old to raise kids_ , he’d decided, and for the most part left it at that.

But by the end of the weekend it became apparent that she’d almost done too good of a job trying to fix things in Sean’s house and take care of Eileen, Camden, and Isaac all at once. Colin came over for dinner, which Sean managed to attend, and after the kids had been put to bed he revealed his true motive: they both started trying to convince her to move in with Sean, to help out with the kids. She declined, and her continued declining became more incredulous at the audacity of the two of them. Sean was grieving, it was true, but that was no bloody excuse for more than half of what he was pulling, how much he was neglecting, and Colin didn’t lift a damn finger himself.

“You have a responsibility to this family!” Colin yelled at one point.

“The only person on God’s green earth I have a responsibility to,” Lillian shouted, “is that little girl!” She pointed furiously at the ceiling, since Eileen was sleeping upstairs.

They went back and forth a few more times, but ultimately, after shouting, “Hire a bloody babysitter!” Lillian left with Eileen that weekend, back to their apartment in Fremont. They never stayed in one apartment too long, what with how Lillian sometimes skipped on bills and almost always sublet or tried to get out of her contract during the summer (so she could take Eileen hunting without paying the rent), but Fremont, she realized, was home—it wasn’t the apartment, but the California School for the Deaf, the one by which Lillian waited at a bus stop every morning and evening the one where Eileen could just exist with a bit less exhaustion for eight hours a day and enjoy being with other deaf people, which was possibly the most important of all the things that Lillian was incapable of providing for Eileen. What did Beacon Hills have when compared with that? It housed an extended family that Lillian knew Eileen had at least some small love for, but ultimately it was a place to visit, nothing more. Eileen belonged in Fremont, belonged in that truck that carried them across the nation—Eileen belonged with Lillian.


End file.
